Mohammad-Javad Larijani, the international affairs assistant in the Iranian judiciary, confessed in unprecedented remarks that Iran facilitated the passage of al-Qaeda members who carried out the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York.

In an interview with the Iranian state TV broadcast on May 30 and circulated by activists on social media networks, Larijani narrated the details of the Iranian regime’s relations with al-Qaeda and how the Iranian intelligence supervised the passage and relocation of al-Qaeda members in Iran.

In the interview, which Al Arabiya translated a part of, Larijani said: “The lengthy report of the 9/11 commission which was headed by figures like Lee Hamilton and others mentioned in pages 240 and 241, i.e. in two or three pages, queries Iran’s role in the issue (and said that) a group of reports stated that al-Qaeda members who wanted to go to Saudi Arabia and other countries like Afghanistan or others and who entered Iranian territories by land or by air asked the Iranian authorities not to stamp their passports (and told them) that if the Saudi government knows they’ve come to Iran, it will prosecute them.”

“Our government agreed not to stamp the passports of some of them because they were on transit flights for two hours, and they were resuming their flights without having their passports stamped. However their movements were under the complete supervision of the Iranian intelligence,” he added.

Larijani said the US took this as evidence of Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks and fined Iran billions of dollars.

Earlier this year, a federal US judge ordered Iran to pay $6 billion to families of the victims of 9/11 after he found various government entities were accountable in the 9/11 attacks. (File Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP)

“The Americans took this as evidence of Iran’s cooperation with al-Qaeda and viewed the passage of an airplane through Iran’s airspace, which had one of the pilots who carried out the attacks and a Hezbollah military leader sitting (next to) him on board, as evidence of direct cooperation with al-Qaeda through the Lebanese Hezbollah,” he said.

Despite that, Larijani, who is the secretary of the judiciary’s so-called High Council for Human Rights, which is accused by international human rights organizations of violations and cover-ups, in Iran, confirmed that al-Qaeda members were in permanent contact with Iran’s intelligence ministry and that they used Iran in their flights to Afghanistan and other countries.

Earlier this year, a federal US judge ordered Iran to pay $6 billion to families of the victims of 9/11 after he found various government entities were accountable in the 9/11 attacks.

Meanwhile, the European court in Luxembourg had issued a decision to freeze $1.6 billion from the Iranian Central Bank’s money in Europe and to hold them in compensation to the families of the victims of the September 11 terror attacks.

Bin Laden’s documents on ties with Iran

The Abbottabad documents which American troops seized from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s hideout when he was killed in 2011 in Pakistan, and which were published by the CIA in November last year, revealed details pertaining to Iran’s relations with al-Qaeda.

Among the 470,000 documents seized, 19 pages were specifically on the prominent ties with Iran.

According to Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio in their analysis in the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a letter showed that a prominent al-Qaeda member confirmed in a letter that Iran is willing to provide everything that the group needs, whether arms, money and training camps for Hezbollah in Lebanon, in exchange of attacking American interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

According to the document, the Iranian intelligence apparatuses has in some cases facilitated visas to al-Qaeda members tasked with carrying out operations and harbored others.

Senior al-Qaeda official Abu Hafs al-Mauritani helped negotiate the deal with Iran before the September 11 terror attacks.

Among the 113 letters in Bin Laden’s handwriting which the CIA disclosed on March 16, 2016 were those that included directions as to how al-Qaeda should deal with Iran.

Iranian embassies’ involvement in Europe

The New York court’s reports revealed that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was described by the 9/11 commission as the “coordinator” of the September 11 terror attacks, met several times with Mohamed Atta, a hijacker of the attacks, in many European cities at the beginning of 2001 then traveled to Afghanistan to submit a follow-up report from the operations’ team to Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

This all happened thanks to assistance by the Iranian embassy in London and afterwards – according to a German intelligence memorandum – he received a visa from the Iranian embassy in Berlin to travel to Amsterdam then to Iran on January 31, 2001. The documents also revealed the names of some senior al-Qaeda figures whose beginning was at the Lebanese Hezbollah camps. The most prominent is Saif al-Adel who later became the al-Qaeda’s No. 3 and a military leader, as he was first trained by Iranian commanders in Lebanon and Iran. Saif al-Adel is the one who made the orders to carry out the Riyadh explosions in 2003 from his headquarters in Iran.

Among the 113 letters in Bin Laden’s handwriting which the CIA disclosed on March 16, 2016 were those that included directions as to how al-Qaeda should deal with Iran. Bin Laden said in one of these letters that Iran is key player for the al-Qaeda “movement” and knows their secrets. He recommended not forming battle fronts against it, confirming the strength of ties between al-Qaeda and the Iranian regime.